Three years ago, the Leica Gallery had an exhibition celebrating the great photographers who used its cameras, and in the show was a picture David Seymour took in 1953 of a wedding ceremony in Israel. I could see from a distance that the wedding was taking place outdoors, as many Israeli weddings do, and that the celebrants were workers and farmers in their none-too-fancy dress clothes. The bride was in white with a simple white lace cap and a reserved expression; the groom, a tall young man, wore a white shirt open at the neck and stood with his head bowed. The chuppah, the canopy held over thecouple to symbolize both the home they will make and the protection of God, was a cloth that was decorated but torn. I moved closer to the picture to get a better look, and burst into tears.

It was clear up close that two of the four poles holding up the chuppah were a pitchfork and a bayoneted rifle. In one frame, Seymour captured the reality of Israeli life: the promise of a wedding, the hard work of development, and the threat of hostile neighbors. That was it; he got it. Seymour was a remarkable photojournalist with a talent for the single shot that encapsulated a complex situation. The International Center of Photography is marking the 60th anniversary of his co-founding of Magnum, the illustrious cooperative photo agency, with “Chim: Photographs by David Seymour.”

Seymour was a short man with a high, domed forehead, who wore dark horn-rimmed glasses that made him look more like a professor than one of the great chroniclers of the wars and terror of the mid-20th century. He was born David Szymin in 1911 in Warsaw, Poland, the son of a publisher of Yiddish language books, and studied graphic arts in Germany. He was studying in Paris at the Sorbonne when the Depression ended his subsidies from home, and he took up photography to support himself. He was soon publishing regularly in French magazines, and became a familiar of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s, who would later be a fellow founder of Magnum. As a correspondent for Regards, a communist magazine, he was sent to cover the Spanish Civil War, where he met Robert Capa, another Magnum founder.

Six of the 25 pictures at ICP are of Seymour’s Spanish war coverage. Four of these are of women working in munitions factories — seemingly middle-class women who appear somewhat out of place in their industrial settings — and are more busy and less heroic than left-wing photos of workers tend to be. The most memorable shot is “Land distribution meeting. Estremadura, Spain” (1936), a woman standing in a crowd while nursing her infant and trying to pay attention to the proceedings. Intense light strikes the side of her upturned face as she concentrates on the speaker; she appears to be a peasant and is desperate to understand what is being said, no doubt a plan she hopes will secure her future and that of the suckling child.

Seymour signed his photographs CHIM, whose pronunciation in French mimics the pronunciation in Polish of Szymin. To his many friends, he was always Chim.

Chim went in 1939 with refugees from Spain to Mexico, where he took photographs published in Life and Paris Match; later that year he arrived in New York. In 1942, he became an American citizen, was inducted into the Army, trained as an interpreter of reconnaissance photographs, and anglicized his name to protect his parents, who were trapped in Nazi-occupied Poland. By 1945, he had a Bronze Star, and was discharged from active duty. Two years later, with Cartier-Bresson, Capa, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum, and began photographing again.

In 1948, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) asked Chim to document the plight of thousands of children in Eastern Europe who were wounded, orphaned, and immiserated by the war. He was always a gifted photographer of children, and accepted although UNICEF could pay only a fraction of his usual fee. The brilliant series he created included “Tereska, a Polish child in a home for disturbed children. When asked to draw a picture of her home, she produced these scrawls,” (1949). The pretty girl with a big bow in her hair stands beside the blackboard with chalk in hand and stares terrifyingly at the camera. Her eyes plead for someone to lead her out of the chaos she has drawn.

Chim learned while working in Europe that his parents had been murdered by the Nazis in 1942. This was one of the reasons he felt close to the new state of Israel, and returned to the haven for Jews several times to photograph its development. The wedding picture is not at ICP, but three other photos are, including the dramatic “Israel, welder posed by large cylinder” (c. 1952). The stock image of a heroic industrial worker is subverted here because the welder in his leather apron and raised eye shield is a Sephardic Jew, dark skinned, with a black beard and curled sidelocks, his dramatic features fixed in a penetrating gaze.

In November, 1956, Chim flew to Egypt with Ben Bradlee of Newsweek to photograph the Suez Crisis. On November 10, four days after the armistice was declared, he left Port Said in a jeep with the famed French combat photographer Jean Roy to cover an exchange of wounded soldiers at El Quantara. As they drove toward the Egyptian lines, a sniper opened fire. Machine-gun bullets hit both Roy and Chim, the jeep turned over, and both were dead.

Henri Cartier-Bresson later wrote, “Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag.”

wmeyers@nysun.com

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